August 2014 - tor-dev - lists.torproject.org

3.6.3-meek-2 bundles that can use the Amazon CloudFront CDN
by David Fifield 05 Aug '14

05 Aug '14

I made some test meek bundles that are capable of using the Amazon CloudFront CDN as a backend, in addition to Google App Engine that was supported before. https://people.torproject.org/~dcf/pt-bundle/3.6.3-meek-2/ https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek#AmazonCloudFront To test it, go to the pluggable transport screen, and choose "meek-amazon" from the selection box. meek is a pluggable transports that hides the true destination of your communication (a Tor bridge) by hiding it behind a different domain name. When you select meek-amazon from the list, your traffic will appear to a censor to be going to the domain a0.awsstatic.com, but will actually be going to a Tor bridge on cloudfront.net. I signed up for the Amazon Web Services free tier, which limits use to 50 GB and 2 million HTTP requests per month. Please feel free to use it, but don't depend on it not going away. If it becomes too expensive, we'll have to shut it down until we can find a way to fund operation long-term. (The same goes for App Engine, BTW.) David Fifield

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Using a Tap for Tor's Homebrew recipe to increase confidence in source code authenticity
by Mark Rushakoff 05 Aug '14

05 Aug '14

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Hi, I noticed that in the instructions for using Homebrew to install Tor on OSX, the instructions say: > As with any application, you should make sure it came unmodified from the orginal source. Unfortunately, Homebrew does not come with integrated verification for downloads, and anyone could submit a modified Tor! If you use a [Brew Tap](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/wiki/brew-tap), you can have a separate repository (which must be on Github) to track the Tor formula. I believe that if the Tor Project owns that repository, there should be higher confidence that a user installing Tor with Homebrew is installing the intended source code, so long as the user runs `brew install TheTorProject/tor/tor` (instead of just `brew install tor`, which will use the formula in the main Homebrew repo). If this sounds like something the devs desire, I have a tap repository ready to go at https://github.com/mark-rushakoff/homebrew-tor. It includes the tor.rb formula from Homebrew, including its full history. If you fork it to the Tor project (or perhaps Github offers a way for me to transfer ownership), then only someone affiliated with Tor will be able to approve changes to where Homebrew retrieves source code to build Tor. The only extra work in adopting this solution would be finding a way to "deprecate" or redirect the main recipe under Homebrew. I'm not familiar enough with Homebrew to provide direction on that topic, unfortunately. Mark Rushakoff -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: OpenPGP.js v0.6.1-dev Comment: http://openpgpjs.org wsBcBAEBCAAQBQJT4G8NCRDqKXFAudXBCAAAcKYIAJwa99tJQOHxvzn1DyDW DZD+ktBrAg0pZ4FEE58+n2KiH1hzeHGuhLh4mLlsD30CGlDqtjmYKiU7VR/P g9jsQTawqmACI5KQkMkOMkdBKsjKfNwCaLxA7mdSoCHsRcmSKhQH++rg1Bli JiQrHgi9DihNrUku2/Km7leiurBrKED1KK2KAJ9mKnVMF2iRjcV//VQ9Nbtp WJp92mydyTnBEGYQPrt6M57WZjYvrkvYV1/eHYZpulrGcPAcXzDYnHgRhRPL 9bolbQhwyPWU6gvEdLC/+NAlCpN1Lfd/RFCyhksgVr6RT8GJFSdpjg1UVkw4 U/63nEVJR8cF0boBtUWQReQ= =baFT -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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carml: tasty treats from your Tor
by meejah 05 Aug '14

05 Aug '14

I've got a first super-alpha release of this thing that's been sitting around for a while. Turns out "sanitize a bit" turns into "refactor some things" and so forth... Anyway, carml does various command-line things with Tor and I thought it might be useful to others (plays nicely with grep, pipes, etc). I would really love feedback on whether the "downloadbundle" command is doing the right thing with certificate-checks. https://github.com/meejah/carml https://carml.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ You can "pip install carml" to try it out. Recommend doing this in a virtualenv: virtualenv trycarml ./trycarml/bin/pip install carml ./trycarml/bin/carml help To check signatures first, instead download the WHL file and associated signature from PyPI, gpg --verify it and then replace "install carml" with "install path/to/.whl" above. Some other things to try: carml downloadbundle --extract --system-keyring echo "hello darkweb" | carml pastebin wait for a new consensus to be published, dump it and exit: carml events --once NEWCONSENSUS Currently, the defaults work with a system Tor (i.e. localhost port 9051). Probably I'll change this to be TBB defaults. To connect to a Tor Browser Bundle instance, do this: carml --connect tcp:localhost:9151 monitor It is written using Twisted and txtorcon. Thanks, meejah

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GSoC: making tor daemon using more cores
by Белоус Михаил 04 Aug '14

04 Aug '14

Hi all, This my first report since my return, from millitary camp. Last week I have been watching tor daemon code and make little refactor. I think I found place where I can use my threadpool to make daemon multicore. I'm going to implement it as soon as I disquise my idea with Nick. Cheers, Mikhail

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Needed improvements to the PT website
by George Kadianakis 03 Aug '14

03 Aug '14

Hello list, in my monthly status report [0] I mentioned that some PT-related parts of the website are in need of improvement. As a response, a few people sent me a private email asking me what kind of improvements I was thinking about. Instead of replying individually, I decided to send a mail to this list. Here are some of the needed improvements: - In the past, our main PT page was the obfsproxy page: https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en However, now that the scene is growing and the obfsproxy fad is shrinking, the main PT page should actually be: https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports.html.en . Users, bridge sysadmins and researchers who want to learn about PTs will probably encounter that page. I suggest we optimize that page towards users and bridge syadmins and let researchers get their information from the "unofficial" wiki page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/PluggableTransports - To make the PT page a bit more end-user-friendly, we could remove non-Tor-deployed PTs from the list, like Stegotorus, Skypemorph and Dust. These are better suited for the wiki, I think. Things that users see in the PT page should be ready to use. Also, it would be great if there was a "How to use PTs" document linked by the "Download PT bundles" section. Unfortunately, I don't think there is such a document atm. Sheried wanted to write one (with screenshots etc.) but I'm not sure if it was ever made. - To make the PT page a bit more bridge-sysadmin friendly, we could link to a "How to become an obfsbridge" document. Currently, the only such document is linked from the obfsproxy page: https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en#instructions and it only suggests installing obfsproxy. Nowadays, such a guide should also be guiding readers to install fteproxy. And Real Soon Now it will need to be guiding readers to install Yawning's obfs4proxy or gobfsproxy. Also, weasel read the guide and was not very happy. For example, the guide _suggests_ using pip as root, this is probably not sound advice and some workaround should be found. - Another document that is needed for bridge sysadmins is a "Best practices for running obfsbridges" document. Such a document could have the following advices: - Which PTs should be installed. - How to install ExtORPort and geoip. - How to find geoip stats from your bridge. - How to check whether your bridge and PTs are used. - How to enable logging in your PTs and general debugging tips. - etc. There are probably other improvements that could be suggested, but this is a good start, I think. Also, those tasks don't have any tickets at the moment. Please feel welcome to make tickets if you'd like, or I can do it at a later time :) BTW, I don't know much about UI or product marketing (#11501), so my advices might be totally off :) [0]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/2014-August/000608.html

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GSoC : Rewrite Tor Weather (Status Update 5)
by Sreenatha Bhatlapenumarthi 03 Aug '14

03 Aug '14

Hi all, This report includes my 4th status update as well. Here is a list of things I've been working on regarding the weather rewrite project. - Fixed some django/database issues that were causing errors(seen with Debug=True in settings) during user subscription in the weather webform. - Added a config option to consider the deployment time only in production mode. This was causing an issue previously because not many relays are filtered(considered recent) due to the presence of deploy time in the consideration criteria. - Made use of django's setup_environ method to ensure the standalone backend scripts running as cron jobs can operate with the proper settings. - Updated the daily script to ensure Tshirt emails are not sent to relay operators more than once. For the changes made, check out https://github.com/meejah/tor-weather/pull/10/ Here's what I'll be working on in the coming weeks. - Squash any remaining bugs with the backend scripts. - Get rid of previous mechanism of fetching data like listeners, updaters etc. - Write down test cases for various usage scenarios(e.g., check if emails are being sent to subscribers) within the vagrant environment. Cheers, Sreenatha

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[GSoC] Consensus diffs - Fifth report
by Daniel Martí 03 Aug '14

03 Aug '14

Hello everyone, This is the fifth status report of my Google Summer of Code project, which is to implement consensus diffs for Tor. My mentors - Sebastian and Nick - and myself usually hold meetings on IRC on wednesday at 16h UTC. As described in my last report, I have spent the past couple of weeks integrating my work into the main Tor repository. It builds fine with the rest, all gcc/clang warnings were solved (mostly just C89 declaration errors) and all make check-spaces warnings were also fixed. You can see the result on the repository I created a few weeks ago on github [1]. You want the branch 'consdiff-1', where you will find src/or/consdiff.{h,c} and src/test/test_consdiff.c. I also added some very basic logging, so that the public consdiff_* functions will log what went wrong when returning NULL. I used LD_GENERAL for now, which I assume is wrong - suggestions welcome. I also simplified some bits for easier readability and usage, which can be found in the commit history. But most notably, I improved the docs and comments. The idea is to be able to stumble upon consdiff.c for the first time and be able to understand what it does, how and why in just a few minutes. It's hard to tell whether I did a good job at that - criticism very much appreciated. Most of that happened during the first week, as I was on a quick holiday during the second. Nick gave me some pointers on how to continue with the integration, and that's what I'll be doing in the next few days. The first thing to do is figure out a way to store multiple consensuses on disk, to be used to fetch and create diffs accordingly. There are now just over two weeks left, but I am confident that I can finish all the coding early enough to be able to test the whole thing properly. Regards. [1] https://github.com/mvdan/tor -- Daniel Martí - mvdan(a)mvdan.cc - http://mvdan.cc/ PGP: A9DA 13CD F7A1 4ACD D3DE E530 F4CA FFDB 4348 041C

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GSoC Stegotorus status update
by Noah Rahman 02 Aug '14

02 Aug '14

Following closely on the heels of my last email ( https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007248.html) I updated the pluggable transports meeting on Friday to the following effect: - Have identified somewhat of a performance regression in the PDF module and am continuing to see if I can find the source. - Finishing moving the Javascript over and am writing slimmer unit tests for it.

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Hidden service don't work or work???
by Liste 02 Aug '14

02 Aug '14

After tor update the hidden service doesn't work: Client: [notice] Closing stream for '[scrubbed].onion': hidden servie is unavailable (try again later). Server: [notice] Tor 0.2.4.23 (git-417f0cacd726e549) opening log file. [notice] Parsing GEOIP IPv4 file /usr/share/tor/geoip. [notice] We now have enough directory information to build circuits. [notice] Bootstrapped 80%: Connecting to the Tor network. [notice] Bootstrapped 85%: Finishing handshake with first hop. [notice] Bootstrapped 90%: Establishing a Tor circuit. [notice] Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like client functionality is working. [notice] Bootstrapped 100%: Done. Not work. [notice] New control connection opened. [notice] New control connection opened. [notice] New control connection opened. Unstable. It stil work after change identity (command via control port), but is unstable. Sometime work and sometime doesn't work! (The time clock is ok).

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Tor GSOC Fog Status Report #5
by quinn jarrell 02 Aug '14

02 Aug '14

H, Since the last status report, I've worked on a couple of things - Refactored the fog client code - worked on ticket #12614 [0] This is my second to last GSOC report. For the last two weeks I'll be working on getting a working version of #12614 in and cleaning/adding tests to the fog code. Quinn [0] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12614

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